27 March 2015

This is an entry for people who like lists. Over the last several years I have collected all the names I can find of the dynatoi in the Morea, nearly 200 of them. I wrote about this earlier. As you will see, I haven't completed tidying up the sources, and I have been adding and subtracting names as I try to refine my idea of dynatos. The late Palaiologean administration was intensely inbred and conservative as you will see from the names. I do not include the names of kapetanioi or Greek kefali after 1460, nor do I include the few Greek names from Venetian territories who are called archons. These are all from the despotates. Google's software did not maintain my tidy columns, but perhaps you will find the names interesting. People who don't like long lists of Greek names should perhaps stop reading here.

20 March 2015

Every
spring I know less about what I am seeing, or, the ratio between what
I know and what I am seeing is smaller. I had not before realized
the mortality rate among crows. A crow could live 20 years and more,
but few seem to survive past two years. These pictures I took last
week at breakfast indicate one reason why, but it is one of the less
common reasons. At least fifty crows were mobbing an eagle that had one of theirs in its claws.

We
had fewer crows than usual over the winter, and this spring there are
only three I recognize. Washcrow and Her are not breeding this
year, but they visit frequently, and spend time sitting companionably, apparently watching the two of us sitting companionably. I have seen Washcrow for 4 years now, since he was brought to our feeder as a fledgling. One of last year's young -- I can't tell if it is Wow or Futhark -- talks to us frequently. A handsome gleaming male I do not recognize comes to the feeder to collect food for his mate -- he will feed her for the three weeks of brooding, and then for the 5+ weeks until the young fledge.

There
is great difficulty defending the crow feeder from the seagull,
and the ground-feeding birds are at great risk from the neighbor's
cat which usually lurks under our car. The Oregon juncos, normally ground feeders, have learned to graze at the squirrel and crow feeders, so they are safe. Sometimes ground means "ground," and sometimes ground means "flat" instead of "perch."

The
raccoons discovered the crow feeder last year – it is on the porch
outside my bedroom – so I have been leaving cracked corn and
peanuts in shells for them. They come irregularly. There is a
beautiful male, a very shy female with a tiny face, a pair of twins,
a female with two young. Sometimes at night, in downtown Washington DC, and
park-side Seattle, there is a horrible squealing shrieking
noise. I identified that sound long ago as the sound of something being
eaten, and would lie in bed feeling miserable when I heard it. Recently I discovered
it is the sound made at the encounter of two raccoons who have not
been previously introduced, and that it need not involve violence at
all, though I think two were fighting Tuesday night. I have also learned that raccoons are not particularly afraid of humans, or of us, and if one starts to leave from anxiety, s/he can be persuaded back: the soothing tones you use for babies and pets are equally successful with raccoons.

We
keep a steady supply of black-capped chickadees who tell us when the feeder needs refilling, or when we are in the wrong area of the yard. There is a nest in
the bathroom window frame, and in summer I can lie in the tub and
listen to little scratchings and chirps. Chickadees can live up to
12 years, and I don't know if the same chickadees come back to the window frame year after
year, or if we have had dozens of residents since the house was built
in 1905.

From
4 in the morning until after supper, the yard is full of small
fragments of music. The birds are calling while the owls are still out, while I am talking to the raccoons. When the sun is up the sounds give the sense of showers of glitter. "Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children." I don't recognize all the calls, but we -- and the neighbors and the park --have robins and house finches and varied thrushes, song sparrows, Townsend's warblers, wrens, juncos,
and now bush tits. The tits were absent all winter, but now they are
back with dozens of babies, so small they look as if you could grab a
dozen at a time. There are so many finger-sized pine siskins that the feeders have to be refilled every second day.

We
have made a good start on a small plantation of meleagris where it can be admired from the sidewalk, and a
hellebore garden in the damp under the nut tree in back. I have become enthralled with hellebores.

13 March 2015

the concluding page of the 1318 Herodotos belonging to George Gemistos Plethon, used by Bessarion in 1436, belonging to Laonikos Chalkokondyles.

The bottom, faded, inscription is the only surviving writing by Chalkokondyles.

The intellectual world of Mistra mostly dissolved in the disorders of the Morea after 1453. George Gemistos Plethon died in 1454 (or 1452: there is disagreement, but 1454 suits my purposes better). Chalkokondyles and his teacher Gemistos had had many conversations over the past few years comparing the progression and personalities of the Ottomans, with what Herodotos had to say about the Persians. After the Fall of the City, which surprised none of them, Gemistos told him it was his responsibility to write a new Herodotos to explain current events, and presented him with his own copy in which he had made corrections. After Gemistos died, Nikolaos Chalkokondyles, in his mid-20s, left Mistra, with the Herodotos . John Eugenikos left that year for Trebizond: perhaps Chalkokondyles took the opportunity to go with him and collect material on Trebizond. He ended up in Constantinople -- Eugenikos seems to have gone to Constantinople, and family members were in business there.

This is what I imagine happened: we have no information one way or another, but there are a number of reasons to think he was writing in Constantinople.

Exhilarated by Gemistos' confidence, Chalkokondyles wrote at the end of the Herodotos – you can barely see it above on folio 340v – “[Belonging to] Laonikos the Athenian. It seems to me that the Greeks displayed a virtue greater than what is merely human, and that they made a demonstration of deeds such as to amaze us when we learn about them in our inquiries. They were also fortunate to have a herald who himself did not fall far short in worth of the deeds themselves, I mean Herodotos of Halikarnassos, who recounted these events in the way in which each happened, in a manner akin to a divine procession."

He was going to be the new herald, and he began: “Laonikos the Athenian has written here the events that came to his attention during his lifetime, both those that he witnessed and those he heard about. . . . In my opinion, those events are in no way less worthy of being remembered than any that have ever taken place anywhere in the world. I am referring to the fall of the Greeks and the events surrounding the end of their realm, and to the rise of the Turks to great power, greater than that of any other powerful people to date.”

I have recently been delighted to acquire copies of Anthony Kaldellis' new two-volume translation of Chalkokondyles, and a third companion volume, A New Herodotos which is a gracefully-written analysis of what we can know about Chalkokondyles, his ideas, and his sources. Kaldellis has wrestled with Chalkokondyles' murky prose -- if he was writing a new Herodotos, he was trying to use Thucycides' language -- and made it lucid. Working back and forth with these books has provoked my speculations.

It is the ending, though, that gives a memorable view of Chalkokondyles. He had intended to write nine books, like Herodotos, and Book 9:78 has a sort of ending, one he would have improved had he had time to revise and clean up his text. But August 1461 was not the end of the history of the Ottomans and the Greeks, and he kept writing. (He had also acquired good material on Vlad the Impaler he had to use.) But the Histories sputter to an unplanned ending early in 1464 with the Ottoman-Venetian war, and the last several pages are a feverish jumble of remarkable fragments of information and errors. Kaldellis comments in his notes, on the incoherence of the last sentences. In these last pages we are watching Chalkokondyles forcing himself to write until he knows he has come to his end. His last sentence is a formal act of reverence to Thucydides. He wrote: “ταῦτα μὲν τοῦ χειμῶνος ἐς τὴν Πελοπόννησου ἐγένετο / That, then, was what was happening that winter in the Peloponessos." Thucydides had ended his third book: “ταῦτα μὲν κατα τὸν χειμῶνα τοῦτον ἐγένετο . . .," and other books similarly.

It has been thought he died of plague but we don't know: plague arrived in the Morea in August 1464 and travelled north, although it is not reported in Constantinople until 1467. It could have been plague. There is certainly an impression of the effects of high fever on the mind.

The manuscript of his book got into the hands of George Amiroutzes, who stuffed in a great deal more information about Trebizond than Chalkokondyles had found it necessary to include. (The first copy was made after Amiroutzes had finished.) This makes me wonder whether Chalkokondyles had heard about the incident in Florence (he himself would have been only about 7 then), an intense discussion between John VIII, Amiroutzes, Bessarion, and Isidore of Moscow who were supporters of Union, against Mark Eugenikos and Gemistos who opposed it. Amiroutzes berated Eugenikos so humiliatingly that Gemistos intervened, only to be shouted down. John said nothing to stop or reproach Amiroutzes, "nothing of solace" (πρὸς θεραπείαν) to Gemistos. Cyriaco of Ancona was at the Council of Union: he met young Chalkokondyles nine years later at Mistra when the boy was about 17. Already interested in history, Chalkokondyles showed him the ruins of ancient Sparta.

The manuscript of Herodotos you see above was in Rome in 1480, in the hands of the copyist Demetrios Rallis Kavakes who was from Mistra.

06 March 2015

I
think of my readers as my guests, and so often – as on my trip to
Greece in late fall – I have been your guest. If you were my guest
in Seattle, depending on when you arrive, some of these might please you as much as they do me.